EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J.  When Ann Kerr took her Game 5 seat Friday night, she knew she would watch her boy play basketball for the very last time. She has business that will keep her from San Antonio, so if Steve makes another big steal, another big jumper and another big 3 in Game 6, well, he's on his own.

Steve Kerr hit two baskets in the fourth quarter Friday to stop a Nets run. The Spurs won 93-83.

By Jeff Haynes, AFP

No more cheers and tears in the stands for Ann Kerr. No more wishing her husband held the ticket stub for the next seat over, there to see his son beat those million-to-one odds.

Like his mother, Steve thought about Malcolm Kerr after he after he roared off the bench to beat the Nets in Game 5, after he eliminated the Mavericks in Game 6, and after he took that bygone Finals pass from Michael Jordan to sink the biggest jump shot of his life. The greatest moments are forever the ones that hurt the most.

"The only thing I'd rather do than watch Steve play basketball," Malcolm Kerr once said, "is be president of AUB."

American University in Beirut.

On Jan. 18, 1984, Kerr was murdered by Islamic militants for the crime of running that school. Two nights later, Steve cried before tipoff and then delivered his best game as an Arizona freshman, making five of seven shots against Arizona State.

He played to escape the pain. He even played the night an ASU crowd hit him with a sick chant of "PLO," sending Steve into a 20-point first-half rage.

Today, at the close of a most improbable NBA journey, the Spurs guard plays for the joy in his own 10-year-old son's eyes.

"To have Nick around has been special," Kerr said. "And then I think, 'Man, it would've been nice for me to have been the son enjoying this experience with my dad.'"

The experience? Kerr played 15 seasons after being the 50th player taken in the '88 draft. If the Spurs beat the Nets, he would've won five championship rings, or four more than Jerry West, three more than Wilt Chamberlain, and two more than Larry Bird. All this for a UCLA ballboy who grew into a short, frail, gravity-challenged guard who had no scholarship offers in high school, and none from Arizona in the post-prom months until a certain concerned party got Lute Olson on the phone.

Malcolm Kerr finally heard the answer he wanted from Olson. Steve would ultimately recover from a serious knee injury and take the Wildcats to the Final Four four years after a 3 a.m. phone call in his dorm room shattered his world.

"Terrorism didn't start on September 11th," Ann Kerr said by phone. "Our September 11th happened in 1984. My husband was killed for being an American."

An American who was raised in Beirut, the son of Presbyterian missionaries. Malcolm became a citizen of the world, the antithesis of the ugly American. It mattered not to the terrorists who waited for him on a bluff above the Mediterranean, ambushing Kerr outside of his office 17 months after he'd accepted a dream job.

They killed him in the very building where he'd met his dear Ann, who still lives in their Pacific Palisades, Calif. home and who still looks outside her windows at the same basket her husband used to play ball with Steve and his three siblings.

"An unspeakable loss," she said.

"My dad's death encompasses a lot of the problems in the Middle East, in that nobody seems to know who's really fighting each other," said Steve, who was born in Beirut and who lived in Cairo.

"My dad spent his life trying to improve Arab-American relations. He spoke fluent Arabic. He tried to educate people there and he wrote books about Middle East policy.

"The most excited I ever saw him was when Begin and Sadat met at Camp David with Jimmy Carter in '79. I remember my dad gushing over the scene of them shaking hands, over the prospect of peace. Yet an all too common theme in the Middle East is the peacemakers end up the victims."

The loss of his father hasn't inspired Kerr to see rightful retribution in every military strike made in the name of all-American justice. He was opposed to President Bush's decision to wage war against Iraq, though the non-stop news of death and dying in the region doesn't remind him of his father's murder.

"It reminds me that I'd love to talk to him about it," Kerr said. "He would've given me good insight on what's going on and what could be done. He would've tried to make sense of it all."

As for his son's Walter Mitty, Forrest Gump travels across the NBA, from Jordan's Bulls to Tim Duncan's Spurs, Malcolm Kerr would have no chance of making any sense of that. "It was beyond the realm of possibility when he was alive," his son said.

"Steve was helped by basketball after his father died," said Ann Kerr, author and coordinator of the Fulbright Scholar program at UCLA. "He knew his father loved it, and he could lose himself in the game."

Steve might just play his last game on Father's Day, a perfect full-circle thought. But every day is Father's Day when you're the son of a martyred man of peace.

"I'm not an overly religious person," Steve said, "but sometimes I wonder why I've been so blessed. Things have just gone so incredibly well for me that there must be somebody up there helping me out. Maybe my dad's been busy pulling some strings."